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T
he world’s earliest evidence for a robust long-distance
trading network comes in the form of thousands of
clay tablets excavated from the Bronze Age site of
Kanesh, in central Turkey. From about 2000 to 1750 b.c., this
bustling city played host to a number of foreign merchants
from Ashur, an Assyrian city some 700 miles to the south-
east in modern-day Iraq. At the end of the third millennium
b.c., Ashur’s king lifted the government monopoly on trade,
opening the way for private merchants to operate donkey
caravans that took luxury fabrics and tin north into the
Anatolian heartland, where they exchanged
their wares for silver and gold bullion in
at least 27 city-states. In private archives
at Kanesh, these entrepreneurs stored
clay tablets inscribed with their business
letters and contracts, as well as shipping
and accounting records. A massive fire
destroyed the merchants’ homes, but
also baked and preserved these tablets,
leaving a record of intensive trade whose
detail wouldn’t be matched until the mer-
chant houses of the Italian Renaissance
began to document their activities.
Harvard University Assyriologist
Gojko Barjamovic is currently collabo-
rating with a group of economists, includ-
ing the University of Virginia’s Kerem
A. Cosar, to use mathematical models
to analyze data from the tablets to
reconstruct this vibrant trading system.
Such is the fine-grained nature of these
documents that the team has been able
to use them to estimate the locations of 11
“lost” cities, ancient centers whose names
are mentioned in the tablets but whose
geographic position is unknown.
Barjamovic has long studied the
Kanesh tablets and used traditional his-
torical techniques to examine trade
routes and posit the location of these
lost cities. “I’ve traveled all over centralTurkey to get to know the region,” says Barjamovic. “I’ve
even stopped in towns and asked local old-timers where the
trade routes were before modern roads were built.” Now,
he has teamed up with Cosar and two other economists to
analyze the tablets using quantitative techniques based on
an economic concept known as the structural gravity model.
First developed in the 1960 s, the model, surprisingly, is based
on Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which states that
the mass and distance between two particles determines the
gravitational attraction between them. This law was used inTHE MESOPOTAMIAN
MERCHANT FILES
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Assyrian cuneiform tablet from Kanesh